Teaching the International Political Economy (IPE) of everyday life through global groupwork

This article explores new pedagogical avenues in teaching International Political Economy (IPE) through a focus on the everyday. The everyday serves as a fruitful starting point to devise pedagogical strategies that go beyond conventional teaching repertoires. We discuss an extra-curricular global groupwork project (GGP) involving students from Australia, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom (UK). Grounded in a student-led, collaborative research approach, this two-year project invited participants to reflect on their daily experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic and the environmental crisis through the lens of IPE, culminating in peer-reviewed publications. We outline the multifaceted potentials of the everyday in IPE pedagogies and its specific application in the GGP, describing our practical organisation of the project while identifying challenges and opportunities for future initiatives. We conclude by reflecting on the GGP’s role in broadening notions of ‘what matters’ in IPE, fostering North-South student dialogue, while highlighting its more ambiguous role in relation to the commodification of critical knowledge within the context of the neoliberal university.